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[[typed text, title]] MAN AND GOAT [[/typed text, underlined]]

[[typed text]] We came up to it though a day glass-clear
The island that we visit once a year,
And none of us supposed, man, child, or wife,
We should see a sight for once a life.
When we came in along the onyx ledges,
The bayberry leaves ran fire on their edges,
And down to meet us and our rolling boat
There came a white and slender young he-goat.
His hooves upon the rocks were a caress,
The only walking thing in loneliness--
So still and touched with sunlight, that it seemed
The island was a thing that we had dreamed.
The only tame thing underneath the wild
Clouds of gulls, the goat was like a child
And let the first man of us there ashore
Take him in his arms and go before.
They climbed the hill and came out on the sky,
The little creature held his head up high,
And he was white as surf, and the man's bare
Shoulders were dark bronze upon the air.
And then the man stopped still against all space,
Blue sky and blue Atlantic, and a grace
Men see but once and briefly stood out clear
In the brightest sunshine of the year.
The arch the goat's neck made was clean and true,
Was youth itself, and it went with the two
Curving shoulders of the man, and he
And the creature were one symmetry.
It all was something long ago and Greek,
Or of the future, none of us could speak
And say for sure, but this, we knew, was law
And something like religion that we saw.
Robert P. Tristram Coffin.